Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Border Security
Australia – 1825 style (includes pirates!)
Intro
The Timor-Arafura Gap
“To benefit fully from Asia's rise, we need to truly understand the diverse ‘Near North’, as opposed to colonial notions of a ‘Far East’”.
- Bill Shorten, Aug 2013
Quite. But sadly, Bill Shorten is not talking literally about Australia’s near north (which I’d define as PNG, West Papua and the south-east Indonesian/Timor islands (say, south of latitude 3ºS, and east of longitude 123ºE) – but about the far north (or more accurately, from the main population centres, the far north-west). If Indonesia gets even a look-in in Shorten’s world view, it apparently goes no further south-east than Bali/Lombok.
Overwhelmingly, though, Bill Shorten’s “Australia’s near north” is north of the equator, and the colonial/northern-hemisphere notion, say, of India as “south Asia” would not be inconsistent with it.
Anyway, I want to move beyond these clichéd north vs east, and colonial vs modern dichotomies. Newsflash: Asia has a south-east, a farsouth-east, in fact (Tenggara Jauh). Yes, it’s obscure, particularly the central (yes, central) parts of it that I’ll be focusing on here. But this is where it’s at – where the backyards of Australia and Asia meet, 300km apart.
The 19th C history of either side of this 300km gap is poignant (but, cue the boys’ own sidebar, it also contains pirates!). But most of all, it is deeply confronting to many of Australia’s colonial founding myths – which is no doubt why the events of 1825 on a new (and thereafter, doomed) British colony on Melville Island and the Dutch-occupied (sort-of) islands to its immediate north have until now, never been properly told, let alone analysed for their present-day ramifications, which include Australian policies re immigration, China trade, and settler/Indigenous relations.
But first, to home in on the “far south-east” area I’ll be talking about. I’m excluding Indonesian (West-) and East Timor, and the islands to their north and west. In the other direction, I’m excluding PNG, West Papua and the Kai and Aru archipelagos, which are firmly in the orbit of Papua. In turn, Papua is arguably more anchored in the south-west Pacific than in south-east Asia. What’s left over, then is south of latitude 6ºS (and north of present-day Top End Australia), and east of longitude 127ºE and west of 132ºE.
I’ll call these islands 300-500km N and NNW of the Tiwi Islands (and 400-600km ditto from Darwin) the “Serwatti Islands”. They have the Arafura and Timor Seas** on their eastern and western fringes respectively, and the straits between them are/were shipping lanes on the direct route between Macassar (present-day Sulawesi) and China on one hand, and Top End Australia on the other. However, note that there was quite possibly more shipping going through these obscure straits in the 19th C (and even 17th C), to and from and Top End Australia, than today – the wounds of 1825 are thus arguably still raw here. Certainly in 2013, without a private boat (the only airport I’m aware of is at Saumlakki on Tanimbar, which in turn is only serviced via Ambon), you cannot do the short hop between Darwin and the Serwatti Islands, and I imagine that the immigration authorities would rather frown on anywhere the Serwatti Islands as an entry/exit point for Indonesia.
“Serwatti Islands” was a label in popular use in the 19th C, that in present-day geography corresponds with most of the islands in the “remote” (as it is invariably described) south-western area of the Maluku/Moluccas province of Indonesia, about latitude 8º S, between and including Kisar and the Tanimbar group. Note that I’m excluding Wetar here, which is officially in south-western Maluku, but doesn’t much concern my subject. Also note that the Serwatti Islands, aka “Serawatti Islands”, both historically and in present-day conceptions of Maluku’s south-western islands, usually do not include the Tanimbar group. But for present purposes, the islands of Babar and Yamdena (the main island in the Tanimbar group, aka “Timor Laut”, and also the largest single island, by far, in my Serwatti Islands grouping) are peas in a pod, as well as being only 130km apart.
As for the 20-odd minor islands west and north-west of the Babar/Barbat group, up to Kisar, which I’m also labelling “Serwatti Islands”, these are too dispersed, and also too peripheral to my subject to be worth a separate nomenclature. And one more clarification: confusingly perhaps, Ambon locals (in Maluku terms, big-city folk) refer to the south-western Maluku islands as Tenggara Jauh, or the far south-east – despite some them being due south, and even slightly south-west, of downtown Ambon (at 128º E).
But in this part of the world (not to mention most of Australia, north-west of Cape Howe), south-east is destiny – and going to or from the south-west is only a Sunday ramble in a cross-wind.
** Darwin sometimes is also caught between deciding whether its harbour abuts the Arafura or Timor Seas – although the case for the latter seems geographically overwhelming, IMO. Perhaps, in occasionally wistfully batting for Team Arafura, Darwin – ever eager to snuggle up to Asia – wishes to metaphorically bridge the Timor Trough, a rather non-snuggly natural feature running the entire length of the Timor Sea, whose eastern end is smack-bang between Babar and Yamdena – at the very middle, then, of my erstwhile, archipelagic centre of Australia’s “near north”.
The
bare facts of the several failed, short-lived attempts to set-up a British
outpost in Australia’s Top End between 1824 and 1849 (Alan Powell, Far Country, p 45) – are
well-enough known, especially the case of the last, longest and most successful
of these, at Port Esssington (1839-49).
However,
there is perhaps a tendency for this comic-heroic pattern of repeated failure to
blunt the edge of the historical record of the first – and most abject – failure,
at Port Cockburn (Fort Dundas*) on Melville Island (1824-1828 #). [*Fort Dundas would have been the name of the military
base within or adjacent to the settlement,
had it prospered, at least; q.v. Fort Wellington for Raffles Bay, and Fort
Concordia for Kupang]. [# Some sources put
the demise of Port Cockburn at 1828, others as 1829.]
Helping
to obscure the record here is the overlap between Port Cockburn and its twin/replacement
settlement at Raffles Bay/Fort Wellington, on the mainland’s Cobourg Peninsula.
Raffles Bay was geographically close to, but did not overlap with, the later
settlement at Port Esssington. Port
Esssington itself was almost the second, rather than the third, British
settlement in the Top End. Though already
reconnoitred, Port Esssington lost out to Raffles Bay either because it was
closer to Croker Island, per Bath’s original instructions, or because the
reconnaissance of Port Esssington had been only superficial.
Conversely,
Raffles Bay’s overlap with Port Cockburn was more temporal than geographical –
the former was settled in 1827, when the fate of the latter, 200 km east, was already
sealed on paper. However the actual
dates of demise of the twins are quite close – Port Cockburn had a protracted
demise, while Raffles Bay’s own, also in 1829# was speedy. But it is not only their close dates of
demise that qualifies them to be called “twins” – London’s original intention
and official instruction was to establish Port Cockburn and Raffles Bay (or
Croker Island, at least) at the same time, and when low staff numbers meant
that only one of these could initially proceed, it was a spectacular mistake,
in hindsight, to have chosen Port Cockburn.
Since
1835, commenters and historians have invariably noted the irony of Raffles Bay being
closed just as it was finding its feet; albeit this took a hard couple of years
to achieve. In contrast to the unfortunate on-the-fly decision to choose the Port
Cockburn location over the alternative (or both), the abandonment edict from
London was carried through to the letter, however palpably misjudged it was at
the time, according to those on the ground.
While
this irony/farce sits well with the plucky-diggers-vs-incompetent-British-toffs
recurring theme in Australian history, an alternative interpretation is that it
was the Port Cockburn fiasco – which couldn’t much be sheeted home to
incompetent British toffs – that sealed the fate of the Raffles Bay settlement.
The older, but feebler, twin thus took its more vigorous twin to the grave with
it – and, however un-Australian this may sound, there was little plucky heroism
in this. For both, the die had been cast
in 1824 when Port Cockburn was mistakenly chosen as first priority, which is
why it is necessary now to look at its surprisingly little-researched, brief
heyday in early 1825.
***
The
bleak, doomed British garrison on Melville Island wasn’t always so. It’s just that early on, it needed Asia very
badly, and upon reaching out in a moment of vulnerability, Asia ferociously bit
back. And in response, as is often the
way, rather than admitting humiliating defeat, the British doubled-up their
efforts, to make the end defeat vaguer in cause, and so more glorious to posterity.
Or until I came along (sorry).
Raffles
Bay thus is easily cast as an aspiring player on the Asian main-stage – a nascent
mainland entrepot**, a la Singapore (which was just a fishing village at the time). This makes Port Cockburn all the more
forgettable, as an entrée or mere rehearsal.
On a scrubby island (although if truth be told, not that different from
the mainland, in terms of terrain and settlement potential), Port Cockburn was
not much talked up as a stillborn entrepot, during its brief life, or
subsequently. There is searing irony in
this; it traded with Asia (or attempted to, at least) just to survive, while mainland Raffles Bay, perhaps better
provisioned by the British and conceptually anchored to Sydney (there was excited talk of building a road between them!), got the
glamorous – if hypothetical, hype aside – role of bustling entrepot where all manner
of exotica were to be traded; of which incoming survival basics would have been the least
interesting items on the list. [** But Raffles Bay's ostensible success arguably
hinged on large-scale Chinese immigration, which may have well been a step too
far, for Sydney and/or London].
The
provisioning question turns on luck, in part – two ships sent from Port
Cockburn to near Asia for supplies were lost to pirates in short succession,
while Raffles Bay had no equivalent interdictions. But pirates usually only
thrive where their home bases are beyond the law, and here there were delicate
matters of empire, with the long-established Dutch and the interloping British,
flexing their ascendant military muscle and keen to consolidate their hold on
the whole Australian continent, facing off across the Arafura Sea. An indication of just how up-close this
face-off was is that Melville Island was formally ceded by the Dutch in an 1824 treaty. Though it seems obvious now that
Melville Island belongs to Australia, and not to Asia, that small, insular Serwatti part
of Asia just to the north of it, barely belonged to the Dutch (or any other
colonial power), despite the Moluccas, just further north in turn, being a Dutch
economic powerhouse for centuries. The spice-less
Serwatti Islands were, like the depressing but closely-charted Gulf of Carpentaria,
too Australian for the Dutch – although the Dutch were happy to fly their nominal
flag over them, if nothing else as a buffer against British interests on
mainland Australia. Otherwise, bar a minimal
handful of Dutch-administered port (and not fort) outposts, the islanders were
left to their own devices – and, when it came to non-Dutch ships, their own murderous
plunders.
Unfortunately,
the plucky Brits at Port Cockburn on Melville Island also had a strongly independent
mindset, when it came to where to go to obtain much-needed provisions: the (theoretically) Dutch-administered Serwattis,
or the free port of Kupang on West Timor.
The former had the advantage of being quite a bit closer to the Top End,
but the disadvantage of being closed ports (to non-Dutch), under a recently-signed
British/Dutch treaty. Oh, and also of being
notorious pirate hotspots.
Why
two ships apparently disobeyed their instructions, or at least common-sense (the
supposed instructions are rather vague), to go to Kupang for supplies; instead
choosing to land at the nearer but much-riskier Serwattis, will probably never
be known. Assuming that there wasn’t a planned
and pointed provocation to the Dutch, possibly there were issues with the boat
or crew, making urgent landfall – anywhere – the priority, and this factor, by
curious coincidence, happened twice in a few months.
I
like to think, however, that there was a crushing geographical fate at work, beneath
which the Brits on Melville Island were mere pawns. If the Serwatti Islands were too Australian
for the Dutch, Melville Island was – similarly – too Asian for the British. United by a sort of Arafura zeitgeist – of feisty
independence from European colonisers, as enabled by a paucity of Euro-coveted resources
## – it was always Melville Island’s destiny to cast off its British veneer as a
passing aberration. [## One account has
it that the Dutch chopped down every nutmeg tree on Babar, because it was too
small and island and too far away from East Indies HQ to bother exploiting, but
equally they didn’t want those who could
be bothered to do so. No doubt this
fuelled Babarians [?] sense of grievance, and so propensity to piracy]
It
is sweet and fitting, then, that the two sides of this Arafuran family drama have
slumbered on ever since, although in separate ways. The Serwatti Islands remain bizarrely remote,
despite their proximity to Darwin, which in turn trumpets its proximity to Asia
(perhaps justifiably, but if so, then its own backyard is rather unkempt). While the Tiwi Islands are now fairly assimilated
geographically into Top End remote Indigenous Australia, the site of Port
Cockburn, and the story of how it went so wrong, seems bizarrely forgotten. As Crocodile Dundee would never have dared to say,
at the pointy end of a Serwatti sword: “Now
THAT’S proximity to Asia!”
Sidebar: Aggregated facts on the two 1825 ships ex Port
Cockburn attacked by pirates
Lady
Nelson
Feb
1825: military ship Lady Nelson departs
Port Cockburn (Fort Dundas) to trade with near Asia. Attacked by pirates on the Serwatti island of
Babar; all crew murdered.
Carried to sell: firearms and
ammunition
Looking to buy: cattle and/or buffaloes,
tortoise shell and drinking water
Stedcombe
April
1825: trading ship Stedcombe arrives,
unloads, and soon after departs Port Cockburn (Fort Dundas) to trade with near
Asia, and to investigate the disappearance of the Lady Nelson. Attacked by pirates
on Yamdena/Tanimbar/Timor Laut; all crew were murdered except for two members,
Joseph Forbes (“Timor Joe”, who retired to Williamstown, Victoria) and John
Edwards. Both were kept as slaves in the
village of “Laouran” on Yamdena. Edwards
died at some stage during the following ten years, while after 14 years a slave,
Forbes was liberated in 1839 and given a hero’s welcome in London.
Carried to sell: beads, knives,
axes, mirrors and cloth
Looking to buy: cattle and/or buffaloes,
pigs and fruit. Note that a scurvy
outbreak at Port Cockburn had intensified after the mysterious (at that stage) non-return
of the Lady Nelson.
Actually offered
on Yamdena: coconuts, pigs and parrots
Friday, November 14, 2014
Boomers booing at Gough’s funeral,
retrospectivity and pauperism
By chance
in Sydney last Wednesday, I thought I might as well go to Gough’s funeral at
the Sydney Town Hall. I didn’t have a
ticket to get in, but reading online news reports that morning made me sanguine
as to the worst case scenario: turning up only to be turned away. The reports
were of quite a few actual ticket holders – not VIPs, but ordinary members of
the public who had applied through a ballot – being turned away, despite having
got there good and early. For such a (legitimately)
disappointed crowd, there would have to be an overflow event near the Town Hall,
I figured. And sure enough, despite
nothing being officially announced or advertised, there was a video screen, and
a gathering crowd, on the south side of the Town Hall.
I was a
free-rider, in other words – which was, I now realise, a wholly appropriate
status for the occasion. As for the general crowd, this carnival of the
ticketless was always going to be a textbook occasion for crowd dynamics. Possie sorted, I was squarely surrounded by
baby boomers and still older generations (who may or may not have been a fair
cross-section of the total crowd).
Being a crowd-pooper
anyway, and with 45 minutes before kick-off, I sat down on the paved ground and
read a book. A breach of (a)
crowd-bonding etiquette, (b) funeral-respect etiquette, or more specifically,
(c) overflow-funeral-crowd mob-think fever-pitch etiquette? Who knows, but clearly I therefore didn’t
join the boomers booing, at various perceived anti-Gough VIP attendees, as they
walked in the doors (I couldn’t see who, but I couldn’t have cared
either).
When it
comes to etiquette, the top-down model is redundant; the personal is the
etique-able, I believe. In a very small way, the booing plainly emanating from
my immediate patch may have been compensating for my tacit boycott of it, via a
one-person sit-in (that wasn’t actually protesting anything, but crowds leap to
conclusions like the proverbial). Less personally,
the fact that some of the overflow crowd at least, had gone to the Town Hall as
legitimate ticket holders, and been rudely shrugged off, must have fuelled some
of mob’s propensity to boo.
VIPs
having ran the gauntlet, the even proper was commenced; those inside now presumably smug, while those
of us in the locked-out rabble outside were now looking or thinking elsewhere
to maintain the rage; none of the speechmakers appeared to be heckle-fodder.
Of the
speeches, I thought it interesting that two Xers got to give the seeming keynote
ones – meaning Gough’s legacy. Noel Pearson spoke the obvious, about Gough’s
dismantling of the Old Australia,
although with too much I’m Making a Serious Speech thumping inflection for my
liking. Cate Blanchett’s earlier speech was much easier to digest, but it did
contain one tidbit that had me stumped – itching to reach for my smartphone to fact-check
her, but you’ll be pleased to know I desisted from so doing until after the
formalities (if that’s the word to describe being in the middle of a twitchy boomer mob).
Anyways,
Ms Blanchett, who as I later found out was born in May 1969, said that she had
Gough to thank for her free tertiary education, without which she wouldn’t be where
she is today. AMEN to that – but I just
couldn’t work out how she’d got through a degree unscathed prior to the
introduction of HECS at the start of 1989 (I didn’t, and I am five years older
than her, albeit I was a positively ancient nearly 20 y.o at the start of first
year, did a double degree, and took a year off to work mid-way). From what I gather, Ms Blanchett did a year
or two only of a double degree at my alma mater Melbourne Uni in 1987 and/or
1988, then dropped out and went to Europe for a year or so; thus indeed missing
the introduction of HECS in 1989.
However, she then studied at NIDA in Sydney for the 3 years 1990-1992. I would have thought that NIDA at that time
was HECS-able, and so not “free”, but maybe it was an enclave holding out from
the buccaneering capitalist Labor government of the time.
Alternatively,
maybe she was just referring to her 1987/1988 Indian-summer free year/s. If so, I wonder if Ms Blanchett’s stated
gratitude at her only partially-free degrees (if she had not dropped-out) actually
refers to the doors that opened when she dropped-out and went to Europe as a
HECS-exile. This is the most coherent
explanation I can find for her gratitude, although it may be drawing a long
bow. If this was the ultimate lesson,
and price, of her free tertiary education, it is a thank-you speech that went
way over the heads of most of the crowd.
A
necessary disclosure here. At the start
of 1989, I was one year from finishing my Law degree, and after that, a further
year from doing my Arts Honours year.
While I briefly considered dropping-out when tertiary fees were
introduced, crudely and without distinction including those well into the
degrees alongside those who could make a less loaded choice to pay or not, in
the end I compromised. I sucked it up
and finished my law degree, albeit feeling cheated and demoralised. Not paying to do my Arts Honours year was a
fairly easy decision; as I could graduate with an already-banked, “free” pass
degree; a far more honourable – and also life-changing – course. I should also add that, had HECS been
introduced prior to my starting
university, I categorically would not have gone there. And one more thing – I now toy with what could
have been, had I, possibly like Ms Blanchett, dropped out of uni at the end of
1988, and gone to Europe as a HECS-exile.
At this
point, I’m sure a fair chunk of you are thinking that I should have just been
grateful for an 80%* free tertiary education (* if you don’t count the aborted
Arts Honours year). Perhaps, but
retrospectivity is an interesting psycho-political beast.
Hearing
retired politicians recently cry “retrospectivity!”, when their Gold Passes are
threatened with forward cancellation, and similar arguments being made to make
negative-gearing for existing property owner-speculators sacrosanct makes me
shake at the extreme sense of entitlement felt by some. Or more specifically, by the boomer crowd in
general (not just the mob outside Gough’s funeral).
Certainly,
if travel already undertaken on a Gold Pass, in good faith, is then billed at
full cost to the pass-holder, then that’s
retrospective. Likewise, if negative gearing is abolished mid-way through a tax
year. But I don’t think that either of
these prospects is remotely on the cards.
Gold Pass holders will have the choice
for future travel – they can pay for it, or stay at home. Likewise, negative-gearing speculators will
be able to either sell-up, or wear their future losses on an unsubsidised
basis. Meanwhile, back in 1989, I was in
the position of being on the last stopover of a started-in-good-faith, long
tertiary education “Gold Pass journey” – only abruptly to be held to ransom by
my own government, and forced to pay dearly, just to get home. Held to ransom is how I saw it at the time – it
didn’t cross my mind to see the potential upside, such as going to Europe as a
HECS-exile.
In
fairness to gravy-training boomers, no entitlement is ever painless to
lose. Indeed, the choice that inevitably comes after the end of the entitlement will
perhaps always be subjectively disquieting, however rational it may look from
above. There used to be a quasi-science
devoted to just this phenomenon, called “pauperism”. Unfortunately – that is to say etymologically
– defined in most dictionaries, the called pauperism’s operative meaning has
veers well away from poverty-central. If
poverty is usually grinding and/or intractable, then the most common form of pauperism
is comfortable poverty, as an alternative
to paid employment. Whether this is a chosen alternative is a matter of hot
debate.
I was
inspired to veer from Gough into pauperism by a reference to Alexis de
Tocqueville’s treatise on the subject (in Richard Cooke, “Much obliged”, The Monthly, Nov 2014) p 28. While the word sounds quaint, like it belongs
in the era of workhouses and debtors’ prisons, it was still in use in 1950s Aboriginal
policy in Central Australia, and often came up in the recurring debate/spot-fire
over whether to ration (for free) adult Aborigines who were deemed capable of working.
Pauperism
also has a fair overlap with entitlement-cancellation angst (aka faux
“retrospectivity”) – so making the psychology of the Old Gold Pass brigade a
case-study illustration of a pauperism’s newer variants. Although no longer anchored to poverty as
such, the moral hazard of classic pauperism is still there – the status quo is
too comfortable; or conversely, the prospect of choice, in the wake of
entitlement withdrawal, is too daunting.
Textbook
pauperism sees its subjects choosing the
lacklustre status quo. Here, time is
palpably ticking; their prospects go increasingly backwards the longer they
delay making the better choice.
Pauperism is compounded zero-rate interest then, while a risk taken with
alacrity can pay handsomely, or if not, allow time for return to
equilibrium. Time also counts in second,
subtler way: the person or system
rationing the pauper usually envisages a time-limit on such sustenance –
although this is rarely expressed.
But even
without this latter factor, there is a strong asymmetry in time-sense between
recipient/pauper and provider – for the latter, pauperism is plainly evil, for
being unsustainably open-ended, if nothing else. For the recipient/pauper, however, the future
is fairly abstract; pauperism is an encompassing present, a day-to-day reality
with a myriad of challenges and choices.
That is, nothing but the
status quo appears to be sustainable.
Back to
Gough, this time-asymmetry is writ large.
His reform agenda’s three years in power were only partly undone later –
free tertiary education leading the axing moves of later governments calling “It’s time” on
Gough. Despite this swingeing attack to
the belly of the best of Whitlamism (I think, anyway), in the public mind the
Whitlam years have had a curiously long afterlife as an intact status quo.
With free
tertiary education now decades in the past, pauperism and open-ended
entitlement are, from the outside, safely, or at least symbolically slain. Yet from within, they are as functionally
strong as ever. Gough Whitlam’s genius
was to perfect entitlement, and so to abolish the taint of pauperism for the
boomer generation. Gen X’s unfortunate fate was to be the ceremonial sacrifice
upon the altar of post-Gough economic rationalism.
